Opinion Brief: Friday, August 19, 2016

Tonight’s Opinion Brief is brought to you by New Canadian Media – a not-for-profit online media organization that presents news and comment from an immigrant perspective for all Canadians.

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Good evening, subscribers. There’s always one person in a prime minister’s cabinet who enjoys the PM’s trust more than anyone else. Trudeau Sr. had Marc Lalonde. Stephen Harper had Jim Flaherty — and his government arguably was never the same after Flaherty’s passing. Justin Trudeau has Ralph Goodale.

L. Ian MacDonald examines the impact that Goodale has had on Trudeau’s government as Public Safety minister — a job that typically calls on him to project an air of calm into a policy field that seems to attract eruptions of panic. “He’s not inscrutable — just imperturbable. One former senior staffer describes Goodale as ‘prudent … you can’t be anything but prudent when you’re a Liberal from Saskatchewan.'”

Thubten Samdup, co-founder of the Canada-Tibet Committee, looks ahead to Prime Minister Trudeau’s China visit and laments what looks to him like another squandered opportunity to hold Beijing to account for its lousy human rights record. “It doesn’t matter which political party is in power; the approach is always the same. This is despite national polling that consistently shows that Canadians are uncomfortable doing business with countries that violate human rights.”

And Rolf Holmboe, the former Danish ambassador to Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, discusses the probable fallout of a failed attempt by Syrian forces and their Russian and Iranian allies to re-take the city of Aleppo. “If the regime allies cannot win an outright victory in the Battle for Aleppo within a certain time frame, Russia and Iran could conclude that underpinning the Assad regime comes at too high a cost.”

Be sure to check back with us tomorrow morning at 10 ET, when we’ll have a piece by veteran former diplomat Jeremy Kinsman on the history behind Prime Minister Trudeau’s China trip. And have a terrific weekend.